Is it possible to make every servo a continous rotating one? I assume you just grind away the portion that blocks the servo arm from making a full 360 motion?
You also need to decouple the potentiometer from the gearing somehow, as it will not turn 180 degrees, and you will want to set it to a certain value for your "center", i.e. no rotation. Some people remove the pot and replace it with resistors, some replace the pot with one more suitable for manual tuning, some just simply remove whatever is necessary to decouple it from the gears and leave the original pot in place.
Note also if you do this you now have 'speed' control of the servo, but NO 'position' control. Many people would like a 360 degree Servo control, WITH position control. If you modify a Servo, you don't get this -- you must add a separate Position Encoder disk to check the position.
NO, some of the older servos do not have complete gears - just a 180 degree crescent of teeth.
Obviously, you can open the insides and take a look and close it back up if it is a no go.
I modified two servos and found that the Seattle Robotics was helpful, but did not completely cover my Great Western servos. I could not get the electronics apart in order to replace the potentiometer with two resistors.
So, I had to pretty much take the theory, make some observations, and do my own thing. [noparse][[/noparse]I ended up cutting the blocking tab off the gear, then removing a strange little piece of plastic from the potentiometer, and centering the servos potentiomer while the case was open (can't do it shut)].
Parallax has a sale now on their full rotation servos and theirs have an hole in them to readujst centering.
If you don't completely remove the block, you will get a click everytime it passes by the stop.
Comments
You also need to decouple the potentiometer from the gearing somehow, as it will not turn 180 degrees, and you will want to set it to a certain value for your "center", i.e. no rotation. Some people remove the pot and replace it with resistors, some replace the pot with one more suitable for manual tuning, some just simply remove whatever is necessary to decouple it from the gears and leave the original pot in place.
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Jon Williams
Applications Engineer, Parallax
Dallas Office
Obviously, you can open the insides and take a look and close it back up if it is a no go.
I modified two servos and found that the Seattle Robotics was helpful, but did not completely cover my Great Western servos. I could not get the electronics apart in order to replace the potentiometer with two resistors.
So, I had to pretty much take the theory, make some observations, and do my own thing. [noparse][[/noparse]I ended up cutting the blocking tab off the gear, then removing a strange little piece of plastic from the potentiometer, and centering the servos potentiomer while the case was open (can't do it shut)].
Parallax has a sale now on their full rotation servos and theirs have an hole in them to readujst centering.
If you don't completely remove the block, you will get a click everytime it passes by the stop.
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G. Herzog in Taiwan
http://www.nubotics.com